Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to the Dr. Gundry Podcast, the weekly podcast where Dr. G gives you the tools you need to boost your health and live your healthiest life.
Dr. Gundry (00:17):
Welcome to the Dr. Gundry podcast. You know, the more I learned about this unique super food, the more I’m convinced it’s one of the healthiest things you can consume and use. That’s because it’s not only great for your brain health, it can actually improve longevity and they’re great for supporting the health of your immune system. And if your ears perked up about immune system, you’re paying attention properly. But mushrooms are also delicious and incredibly easy to prepare. That’s right. I am talking about mushrooms. And my guest today is one of the world’s leading expert on fungi. He’s Jeff Chilton, the co-author of the classic book, the mushroom cultivator, and the founder of Nammex, a company that specializes in developing organically certified mushroom products. Jeff and I are going to discuss why mushrooms are one of the most powerful medicinal foods on Earth. Why you’re probably not getting enough of them in your diet and the best ways for you to prepare mushrooms at home. So Jeff, welcome to the podcast.
Jeff Chilton (01:33):
Dr. Gundry. Thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited to be here.
Dr. Gundry (01:38):
So I want to start with your background. Jeff, how the heck did you become obsessed with mushrooms?
Jeff Chilton (01:48):
Well, I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, Seattle, actually and you know, we live in a climate here that is very rainy. It’s a maritime climate. So in the fall, mushrooms are everywhere. So early on, I was able to get out and do some mushroom hunting. And you know, mushroom hunting is kind of like going on a treasure hunt. You’re out in the woods, it’s beautiful, it’s whatever, you find mushrooms and it’s like, oh my goodness, look at that. So early on, I was exposed to them. And when I went to university in the late 60s, my field of study was actually anthropology. But I also studied mycology when I was there, and I put the two together and called it ethnomycology, which is the study of mushrooms for food, for medicine, and in shamanic activities. As you’re well aware, there’s a lot of shamanic activities going on in the 60s.
Jeff Chilton (02:50):
And so what do you do with a degree in anthropology after you graduate? And so at that point, this was in 1973, I decided well, I’d love to learn how to grow mushrooms. There was one mushroom farm in Washington State. Olympia, Washington. I went there, I applied for a job, I got a job there. I was there for the next 10 years very large farm living with mushrooms.
Dr. Gundry (03:22):
Now when you say a large farm, somehow I don’t conceive that you’re out there in a pasture harvesting mushrooms. I view mushrooms sitting in some dark cave being grown so help me with what’s mushroom farming like?
Jeff Chilton (03:40):
Well that’s so interesting. I’ve met so few people that have actually been or seen a mushroom farm. The reason we don’t see it is because mushrooms are grown inside in very large buildings almost warehouse like. The reason is because you need to control the environment. Mushrooms need a high humidity to grow, so you don’t grow them outside at all, you grow them in. It’s in the West, we use a lot of mechanical systems, fresh air, humidity, we control the temperature to give them optimum conditions. So they’re inside in these very large rooms. And what’s interesting is that every year on that farm, we had 200 different crops on this 90 day cycle. So every week we’d put in four new crops, we dumped four old crops. Over the course of my 10 years, I saw 2,000 different crops of mushrooms. Now compare that to a normal farmer, how many crops do they see? Maybe 50 in a lifetime, I saw 2,000 crops over the course of 10 years.
Dr. Gundry (04:51):
All right, so you’re growing mushrooms in warehouses, and so take me through what prompted you to start your own company?
Jeff Chilton (05:05):
Well, while I was there at the mushroom farm, I was reading everything I could get my hands on about mushroom cultivation and mushrooms in general. And two things happen, one of which was I had a Japanese scientist there, and he was our head of research and development. He was growing shiitake mushrooms, oyster mushrooms, and enoki mushrooms. So I was exposed to these other species. And as I read more about these different species, I came across the use of mushrooms in Asia, or basically, I knew about that, but I learned more about it the fact that they were used in traditional Chinese medicine. So a part of their whole herbal group of different plants and they used mushrooms. One of the things about growing mushrooms, Dr. Gundry is you are like a babysitter because if you’ve got all these crops going on, mushrooms are harvested by hand. You have to be there every single day, so this farm never slept. It wasn’t like you could walk away after the end of a crop. No.
Jeff Chilton (06:19):
So after I left the mushroom Farm in 1989, I decided to move from mushrooms as food to mushrooms as medicine or essentially nutritional supplements and so that’s when I started my business Nammex.
Dr. Gundry (06:39):
Got you. Okay, so you mentioned something I want to come back to, what the heck is a mushroom? Well, let’s start with the basics. So it’s probably more than that button mushroom I grabbed in the grocery store.
Jeff Chilton (06:58):
Correct. Mushroom is actually a fungal organism and the lifecycle of this organism it starts out… first of all mushrooms don’t have seeds. How do you grow mushrooms if you don’t have seeds, right? Well, mushrooms produce spores, those spores in the natural environment flow out, land on the ground, they’ll land on wood. When conditions are right which in the northwest is the fall, the temperature drops down and… well, these spores what happens is they will germinate into a very fine filament. When those filaments come together, they form a network. That network is called mycelium and the mycelium is what is consuming all the organic matter out there in nature, whether it be leaves, whether it be woody tissue. They are decomposing all that, repurposing all of that organic matter ultimately into humus. So this mycelium as it spreads out, and is breaking down all this organic matter, it’s building up a store of energy.
Jeff Chilton (08:10):
Actually, fungi produce glycogen like humans that they don’t have starch. When the conditions are right in the fall, up comes a mushroom and the mushroom is considered the fruiting body and as it develops, when it gets mature, there will be gills underneath the cap of the mushroom. Those are where the spores are produced. So think of it as we have three what we call plant parts. We have spores, we have mycelium, which is the vegetative body, and then we have the mushroom which is the fruiting body. Now we normally don’t see the mycelium because it’s embedded in its substrate. It’s in that piece of wood, it is underground. If you were to actually pull that mushroom out and look underneath down in the ground, you would see this network, a very white filaments. So you could actually see and observe the mycelium there, but normally we would not see that. So these are the three plant parts that make up this fungal organism. We eat the fruiting body, the mushroom, that’s what we eat, and that’s what’s primarily used for its medicinal properties.
Dr. Gundry (09:30):
So what characteristics differentiate a medicinal mushroom from plain old everyday mushrooms that we eat, but we can also eat medicinal mushrooms, right?
Jeff Chilton (09:45):
Absolutely right. And that’s what’s so interesting about it because I consider mushrooms to be food as medicine and as you know, we want our food to be not just nutritionally good for us, but also if it could be medicinal, I mean, what a fantastic bonus there we have. So the mushrooms and this is all mushrooms in their cell wall they have compounds called… Now, all mushrooms have these beta-glucans. But not all beta-glucans are exactly the same, they will have a different architecture. And what you have to remember about a beta-glucan because people say, oh, beta-glucans, they’re in oats or they’re in grains. And the fact is those are what are considered a beta 1314. Fungi have a beta 1316 that one four does not have the immunological properties that the beta one six does. And then when we get down to the different mushroom species themselves, they will have a little bit different architecture of that beta one six.
Jeff Chilton (11:02):
And that is the key to a mushroom that is strongly medicinal or is just simply something that is desirable to eat and here are the ones that are really great that we can eat and also get those properties. Shiitake, do you eat shiitake mushrooms?
Dr. Gundry (11:23):
Absolutely. In fact, I posted a pressure cook bean and shiitake mushroom and rosemary meal that I made a week ago. Actually, this last week did… well, I won’t get into it, but I usually have mushrooms two or three times a week as part of my dinner. Different ones.
Jeff Chilton (11:49):
Absolutely. I have mushrooms probably four or five times a week. Shiitake mushrooms are fantastic. What a wonderful flavor? In China, they’re called [foreign language 00:12:02] which means fragrant mushroom. So there’s a mushroom that is not only a prime edible, but it is also highly medicinal. So is maitake, so is the lion’s mane. And these are actual mushrooms that are out in the supermarkets or natural foods markets in most metropolitan areas. So we can actually buy those mushrooms fresh, put them into our diet. And look, I tell people before you even think about supplementing, put mushrooms into your diet. They’re just a fabulous food in so many different ways.
Dr. Gundry (12:49):
Well, that’s a great point. So yeah, you’re right. I live in areas where luckily, great variety of mushrooms are now available in our stores, which is fabulous. But what about somebody who doesn’t have that ability? Are dried mushrooms equally as usable? What do you think?
Jeff Chilton (13:10):
Oh sure, yes, dried mushrooms absolutely are. Unfortunately, unless you have Asian markets in your community, you look at dried mushrooms in a normal supermarket and my God they are expensive, way too expensive. And that’s one of the issues that we will probably talk about and that is why it is that in the United States, we can produce fresh mushrooms and growers can make a profit, but you cannot produce mushrooms for supplement use. And the reason is very simple. It’s like fresh mushrooms, they’re 90% water. When we dry those out all of a sudden what we were getting $5 a pound for we have to get $50 now. That’s why when you see the dried mushrooms, a little tiny packages, sometimes it’s like 15 grams, and you’re like $3 for that? Are you kidding me? And so that’s the reason is that once you dry them out and supplements are dried powders, so literally, there’s no supplement in the United States mushroom supplement that was actually grown in the United States.
Dr. Gundry (14:34):
So you mentioned all these benefits and you said one of my favorite words, immune strengthening qualities. Take our listeners and viewers through what is the association with mushrooms and helping the immune system.
Jeff Chilton (14:56):
Well, you know what, they’re called actually biological response modifiers or potentiators, and what potentiation really means is to strengthen, and that’s their role, they will actually strengthen our immune system. And the way they do that is that mushrooms are actually very high in fiber. So we don’t digest them in our stomach, they get digested as they go through our intestines, they also feed the microbiome. But we actually have receptors in our lower intestines that are specific to beta-glucans. And so when those beta-glucans, come down there and they hit those receptor sites, what happens is then they will produce more of the immune cells that we have, whether that is macrophages, T-cells, NK cells. So that’s really how they act and part of the two is that as modulation they basically are there if you need that type of boost strengthening and production of more immune cells, they will do that. If not, they’ll kind of just sit there and that in a sense is what some people term an adaptogen, which is something that works in the background.
Jeff Chilton (16:29):
It’s there and that’s why I tell people eat mushrooms, put them into your diet, because you just want them there for when you are challenged by some disease.
Dr. Gundry (16:43):
And I think you brought up a good point, all mushrooms have phenomenal amounts of soluble fiber that our microbiome, our gut buddies think is kind of the best thing they ever ate. And the more of these things that you get into your diet, the more healthy and vigorous your microbiome is, which I and others think, in turn, teaches our immune system that things are great down in the engine room and you guys go do what you need to do. So I think yeah, it’s a one two punch.
Jeff Chilton (17:24):
Yeah. And I think that’s a great point because here’s just an interesting fact when I went to work on the mushroom farm in 1973. At that time, classical nutritionists looked at mushrooms and they said, hey, no food value here. Tastes good, no food value. And the reason they said that, interestingly enough, was simply because mushrooms are low in calories, but high in fiber which we know is very important for our digestion and to feed the microbiome.
Dr. Gundry (18:01):
Yeah, absolutely. And boy, we sure got that one wrong, I can remember those days. You mentioned lion’s mane, which has a reputation as a brain booster. Tell me about this mushroom compound called ergothioneine.
Jeff Chilton (18:23):
Well, ergothioneine is pretty interesting. Most people never even heard of it before. But actually, scientists have discovered that we have ergothioneine in our different parts of our body kind of all over, but it’s accumulated in specific organs like the kidney and the liver, where there’s a lot of oxidative stress. And so they’re kind of looking at ergothioneine as a high level antioxidant. Now they’re not actually sure what it does or how it works. But the fact of it being there and we don’t produce it we have to get it from some external source and lo and behold, mushrooms are one of the organisms that produce high amounts of ergothioneine. So eating mushrooms we will actually get reasonable amounts of ergothioneine. There’s not that many other foods that do produce it, but mushrooms are one of the ones that produce quite a good amount of ergothioneine.
Jeff Chilton (19:27):
In fact, we test all of our products for ergothioneine, so we have a body of information now that we’ve been testing for three years now. Every single lot that we produce of our mushroom extracts, we test for ergothioneine because we think going forward, this is something a lot of people are going to be interested in and want.
Dr. Gundry (19:56):
So are you allowed to say which mushrooms or which of your mushroom products have more ergothioneine than others?
Jeff Chilton (20:07):
What are you talking about, our secrets?
Dr. Gundry (20:09):
Yeah, your secrets.
Jeff Chilton (20:11):
Yeah, for our secret sauce. Actually, you know what’s interesting shiitake, very high in ergothioneine. So is lion’s mane and maitake, so those three mushrooms there… oyster mushroom is also high in ergothioneine. It’s interesting because the polyporus which are non gild mushrooms, and the polyporus are also kind of woody like a reishi or a turkey tail or even a chaga they essentially produce lower amounts of them. And that’s kind of something that has come out of our study of ergothioneine in mushrooms.
Dr. Gundry (20:59):
All right, how about I in the longevity paradox talked about polyamines and mushrooms are a very interesting source of polyamines. And polyamines may be a very interesting longevity promoting compound. Ever heard of them or have I stumped the stars here?
Jeff Chilton (21:21):
You have stumped me. I’m not very familiar with polyamines, you’d have to explain it to me. No, that’s not something that I see a lot of research being done regarding mushrooms and polyamines.
Dr. Gundry (21:35):
Well, they do. They actually seem to turn on some interesting longevity genes, part of the SIRT1 pathways, they’re also present fun fact, in aged cheeses like Parmesan cheese, and there’s a thought that it’s the aging and the fermentation process in those cheeses that produces the polyamines. So there you go. So have a little Parmesan cheese on your mushrooms tonight, will be in good shape.
Jeff Chilton (22:07):
Yeah, well, you know it’s interesting because fungi also are what’s in Roquefort blue cheese though that’s a mold actually in there. So it’s in there fermenting that and you can actually see it because it turns to that dark kind of bluish color.
Dr. Gundry (22:23):
I’ve asked other experts in mycology this question so I’m going to give it to you because it comes up in social media all the time that if you are worried that you have Candida or yeast overgrowth, that the last thing that you should eat is mushrooms because it feeds Candida, what say you sir?
Jeff Chilton (22:52):
Laughs. I’ve heard this before to a lot since the 90s. And you know what, if you go out there and search, and try and find any scientific rationale for that you’ll never find it. It’s kind of an urban myth. And I think it comes from what is called the doctrine of signatures, where like… has an affinity for like, it’s like if you find something, for example, that’s in the shape of a kidney, it must work for our kidneys, right? Yeah, so I think that’s where that comes from. And I know naturopaths and herbalist who will also tell you, that is absolutely not true. In fact, mushrooms are often used in the treatment of Candida.
Dr. Gundry (23:36):
Oh, yeah, I agree. So far, all the experts that I’ve asked on this have said 100% that’s one of the great urban myths and there’s no scientific basis for it.
Jeff Chilton (23:49):
None that I’ve ever seen.
Dr. Gundry (23:51):
So for the average consumer, what are the best mushrooms for health before we get into mushroom extracts and medicinal mushrooms. I mean, what do you do? Can I eat button mushrooms from the store, cremini mushrooms, what do you suggest?
Jeff Chilton (24:10):
You know what? Yes, I love button mushrooms. And of course, I grew them for 10 years, and I never got tired of them. I still find them to be one of the choice edibles out there and I always will buy them and you can always… they’re always there. Believe it or not, they actually also have shown medicinal properties in research. So they’re an absolutely good mushroom and they’re actually being grown today with far fewer chemicals than they used to. When I was on the mushroom farm back in the 70s, we had a program and it was like this stage you use this fungicide, at this stage you use this pesticide and it was just unbelievable. Today they grow them pretty much chemical free. But I personally really believe in organic production of food just because why should I be getting extra chemicals with something that I’m trying to have nutrients and supply my body for that. So no, that and definitely agaricus, shiitake is everywhere. Definitely put shiitake into your diet that’s just a fabulous mushroom.
Jeff Chilton (25:23):
And just quickly mushrooms have… and every mushroom has a different nutritional profile 20 to 40% protein, high quality protein, good amino acid profile, maybe only one of the essentials that is missing mostly carbohydrate, but those carbohydrates are the beta-glucans. They also have a carbohydrate called mannitol, which is a very slow acting carbohydrate. Aren’t we looking for kind of slow foods and not like high gi type of foods where we’re getting that glycemic index, high glycemic. We don’t want those, we want slow acting foods, good level of B vitamins B1, two and three great levels of those, phosphorus, potassium. It’s just a really good food. So definitely get it into your diet. And then of course, if you’re looking for a little more you feel like your immunity is somewhat compromised that’s where I tell people okay, now yeah, let’s try a supplement. Let’s work with some of these mushrooms.
Dr. Gundry (26:31):
So let’s go there next. I know you are insistent about organically grown mushroom supplements. Where do you get these mushrooms that you’re going to do extracts from everybody worries that they come from China and can you talk to that for a minute?
Jeff Chilton (26:57):
Sure, absolutely. You know I went to China for the first time in 1989 to an international mushroom conference, and then for the next 10 years I traveled throughout China, research institutes, processing factories, farms. So I met all sorts of people there. They have a very robust mushroom industry. In fact, here’s an interesting… China produces 85% of the world’s mushrooms. Now we produce our mushrooms back up in the mountains far away from industrially polluted areas. And not only that, I mean, since they’re organically certified and I went to China in 1997, with OCIA, the large organic certifier in United States, we had the first organic certification workshop for mushrooms in China. Before our products leave China, they’re tested for pesticides, heavy metals, micro organisms. When they arrive in the United States, we test them again, different laboratories, we test them again, I cannot sell my products unless they meet those standards. It’s just that simple.
Jeff Chilton (28:10):
And look, I understand why people are afraid, we hear all of these stories about food products in China and so on. Hey, we have E. coli outbreaks here in the United States with meat products and so on. So really it’s one thing to be stirring China with a very broad brush. But look, the people I work with over there are fantastic. I’ve been working with them for over 20 years. It’s a interesting country. They’ve got a fantastic agricultural industry, mushrooms being a part of that, and the people growing them are making a very good living and they grow them in a very natural way. We grow them over here. You know how it is over here we throw a lot of money so we got a lot of equipment and all of that. Whereas over there, they grow them very naturally outdoors, shade houses, no controls of fresh air or humidity because they grow them in a certain season where the temperature is right and the humidity is high and so very natural process the way they grow them.
Dr. Gundry (29:23):
You and I eat a lot of mushrooms, you want everybody to eat lots of mushrooms. You’re getting all these benefits from eating the mushrooms. Where do the tinctures of mushrooms, the medicinal supplements that you can take fit into this plan?
Jeff Chilton (29:44):
Well, and I think this is very important because you know, a lot of people are somewhat aware of what mushrooms do the effects they have the medicinal mushrooms, but when it comes to quality of them, there is huge issue out there and that is we talked about the plant parts, spore, mycelium, mushroom. Because you cannot grow mushrooms in the United States for supplement use the cost factor is too high, what companies do they will grow mycelium on sterilized grain. So they will grow it on brown rice, they will grow it on oats, they will grow it in a laboratory and they will grow out this mycelium in 30, 60 days it colonizes the grain, covers all the grain. It looks like a big block of white mycelium. Are you familiar with the tempeh?
Dr. Gundry (30:45):
Yeah.
Jeff Chilton (30:46):
Do you know actually how tempeh is made?
Dr. Gundry (30:50):
That’s exactly you’re describing it.
Jeff Chilton (30:54):
Yes, exactly. Tempeh is cooked soy bean with a fungus growing on it. So what you’re actually eating is fungal mycelium. So what these companies are doing is they’re growing out whether it’d be shiitake or Reishi, mycelium on sterile grain. At the end of the process, they dry it, they grind it to a powder, grain and all and the worst part about it is then they sell it as mushroom. And when you analyze these products, what you find is that they are mostly starch from all the grain and this is something we have a very specific test for fungal beta 1316 glucans. And this test tells us what the level of beta-glucans are in any one of our mushroom products. It also measures alpha-glucans, which are the starches or glycogen. A mushroom has 25 to 50% beta-glucan it has less than five percent of glycogen. When we measure these myceliated grain Tempeh like products, they are the exact opposite.
Jeff Chilton (32:19):
They have around six percent beta-glucan and 30 to 60% alpha-glucan which are the starches and if you taste these products, you’ll taste them, they taste like flour. It is just absolutely for me, the fact that so many products out there on the market are this myceliated grain tempeh like product being sold as mushrooms. I consider it… adulteration is what I consider because they’re not mushroom.
Dr. Gundry (33:01):
Okay, so how does the consumer figure this out? What do you look for?
Jeff Chilton (33:07):
Yeah, that’s a great question because man you go into the stores these days and how many mushroom products are on the shelf like 50 of them, right?
Dr. Gundry (33:15):
Yeah, it’s just wild now. Yep.
Jeff Chilton (33:18):
Yeah incredible, and what you would do is you would turn it over to the supplement facts panel, you would see if they say mycelium and in the fine print, where it says other the ethical companies selling an unethical product, the ethical companies will actually say, myceliated rice, myceliated oats or something that’s a dead giveaway. The other thing is that the companies that manufacture these products and sell them wholesale to other companies sell them as mushroom. These other companies think they are selling a mushroom, they won’t actually even tell you that there’s grain in there. I mean, can you imagine I go to a show called Paleo FX?
Dr. Gundry (34:06):
Yep, I speak there.
Jeff Chilton (34:08):
Well, yes, I may have even spoken to you there, you may have come by my booth. People come up and they say, I love mushrooms and I’m like, great. What brand do you take? And they’ll tell me the brand. Can you imagine when I tell people who don’t want to eat grains that they are actually taking a mushroom product that’s not mushroom and it’s actually mostly grain starch?
Dr. Gundry (34:34):
I’m sure their mouths drop open, and they probably email me and say, there are lectins in mushroom products. I mean, what are we going to do about this?
Jeff Chilton (34:44):
Well, it’s a major shock. Let me tell you and this is what the other thing is with these products, they will say on them made in the USA, okay. If it says that, if you can see mycelium on the back, you know What you’re getting is actually a tempeh like product that is, unfortunately, mostly starch, much more starch than actual fungal tissue, and you’re not getting the beta-glucans that you were looking for.
Dr. Gundry (35:14):
Great information. What other information should somebody be armed with? What are you working on now to help the consumer because everybody’s interested in mushrooms, particularly in this day and age, everybody hears how mushrooms support the immune system. So it’s a hot topic.
Jeff Chilton (35:37):
A couple of things. Let me just say this, first of all, do not expect that your mushroom supplement is going to work for you overnight that’s not how it works. It takes time for that to actually then be there as that kind of buffer as that working in the background organism helping you out with your immunity. The other thing that’s really interesting by the way is that mushrooms have a compound in them called ergosterol. When ergosterol is exposed to UV light, it actually turns into pro-vitamin D and ultimately vitamin D2. So we actually have now a product that is 1,000 IU vitamin D that we sell. That all it is, is mushroom powder that has been exposed to UV. And most of the research out there does indicate the D2 and D3 are very similar. Some people say well, you need more D2 than D3 and whether you do or not one of the world’s major authorities Dr. Michael Holick at University of Massachusetts, he studied it for a long time. He pretty much says no, look, they are functionally the same, you’re going to get the same benefits.
Jeff Chilton (37:04):
And D2 has been used for a long time. I mean, I don’t know if you’ve ever read the history of vitamin D, but where they really decided that’s how important it was, was back in England in the 1800s when the Industrial Revolution blotted out the sunlight and all of a sudden children were getting rickets and the children in the country were not. So that’s just another one of those and you can actually slice up your mushroom and lay it out in the sun and it will turn that ergosterol into vitamin D2, which is something 15, 20, 30 minutes and you can do that, sliced up thinly, a lot of surface area, you can boost the vitamin D level of that. The other thing I would really like to say, Dr. Gundry is, have you ever heard anybody say to you mushrooms they’re so slimy, it’s like oh, they’re awful?
Dr. Gundry (37:58):
Yeah, my wife.
Jeff Chilton (38:01):
Well, the real issue is that you have to cook mushrooms with a high heat because if you don’t what happens is all the water comes out and now they’re just sitting in a pool. You really need a high heat. What I do [inaudible 00:38:15] hot pan I like to cook them in olive oil, hot pan I throw them in, it kind of sears browns the sides of them. I usually will slice them about a quarter of an inch thick. It’ll brown the outsides of them keep the water in, I’ll do it for a little longer than maybe most people would. But when they… and remember, mushrooms when you’re frying them up and that’s how I normally cook them will shrink. You think you’ve got a lot when you put in there and then later on, you’re going where did they go. So they will shrink, but when you cook them that way and you just kind of brown each side you cook them on that high heat so the water doesn’t come running out of them, they are no longer slimy. They’re actually dry on the outsides and you can put them into anything.
Jeff Chilton (39:07):
They go with every… I mean stir fries, eggs. I’m a meat eater, I eat them with my steak. It’s just like a fabulous food, it’s so versatile. So that’s a tip that I’m always telling people because when I say eat more mushrooms, I don’t want them to come back to me and say, oh, yeah, but my kids just thought they were slimy. They didn’t eat them.
Dr. Gundry (39:30):
Great tip. So what I’m going to do you know living in Palm Springs in Santa Barbara. I’m going to put my mushrooms out for a tan for half an hour before I cook them. And anybody who wants to come and visit me after all this is over… Well, maybe you can put them in a tanning bed and do the same thing. But that’s a great tip to kick out the vitamin D in your mushrooms. And you’re right, searing them in high heat with olive oil is a great technique. And I think we’re going to end it on that. So where can people find out about you find out about your work?
Jeff Chilton (40:14):
Come to our website nammex.com and N-A-M-M-E-X.com we have a lot of educational information there. And that’s why I like people to come there. We’ve also got some great slideshows that show how our mushrooms are produced, talks about the differences, but just a lot of information there. And then if people are going well, where can I get these? We do have a retail side, which is realmushrooms.com we’ve also got a lot of good information there on real mushrooms. And so what I do is try to educate people to the wonderful benefits of this fungal organism. I mean, it’s just amazing. It’s just such a great food and it’s such a great… food is medicine. I just think that’s what we all want to ultimately have when we’re eating and have our foods be our medicine as well. And so that’s what I really feel about mushrooms and I really like to help people understand that.
Dr. Gundry (41:18):
Well, thanks a lot and good for you. We’re going to keep getting the word out, get mushrooms in your diet one way or another, and I actually use a lot of mushroom supplements myself and eat a lot of mushrooms so I’m with you on this. So it’s time for our audience question. Terry on DrGundry.com asks I’m at the point where I want to get rid of my leaky gut but during these times with the pandemic happening is the plant paradox diet easy to start? Well, Terry, believe it or not, this is probably the best opportunity that exists to start the plant paradox diet. You are at home, it is easy to use the recipes and here’s the great thing most of the foods that you’re not supposed to eat are wiped out of the grocery store shelves, all the breads, all the pastas, all the tomato sauces, all the cookies, the crackers, the candies, they’re gone. And all the good stuff like mushrooms and greens and broccoli and grass fed beef and pastured chicken. They’re stocked up on that because everybody’s buying the bad stuff.
Dr. Gundry (42:43):
So you can go into… and I have looked in most stores, I go in and check out these counters. This is the perfect opportunity to start the plant paradox. Quite honestly all the bad foods, luckily have been removed by others from the shelves. So take advantage right now. And this is the perfect time. Thanks for asking it’s a great question. Jeff, thank you again for being here and keep up the good work and love those mushrooms.
Jeff Chilton (43:18):
Hey, thank you very much for having this conversation with me Dr. Gundry. I really appreciate it and I really love what you’re doing and the foods that you’re talking about. So important.
Dr. Gundry (43:31):
And now it’s time for our review of the week. This one comes from Amy P. Quinn on iTunes. Thank you, Dr. Gundry for the abundance of love, light and inspiration you put out into the world, forever grateful for you. Well, thanks a lot. I hope you feel that coming from me. I’m grateful for you for listening to what I have to say. And we’re all in this together and thanks for watching, appreciate it.
Dr. Gundry (44:05):
Thanks for joining me on this episode of the Dr. Gundry Podcast. Before you go, I just wanted to remind you that you can find the show on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you want to watch each episode of the Dr. Gundry Podcast, you can always find me on YouTube @YouTube.com/Dr. Gundry because I’m Dr. Gundry and I’m always looking out for you.
